My Inspiration for July 2020

I felt super inspired this July and I read some amazing books; Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin (I watched the film years ago, of course, but now I wanted to read the book too), The Secret History by Donna Tartt which really amazed me, Sex, Art and American Culture; a collection of essays by Camille Paglia which I enjoyed immensely because Paglia is brilliant, original, straightforward, she always penetrates to the core of things and always says what she means and isn’t afraid of being disliked, and those are some qualities I admire, and so consequently her writing is the same. She won’t sugarcoat anything for you, she writes it as it is. And lastly, I read Torn Apart: Life of Ian Curtis by Mick Meddles and Lindsey Reade which gave a fascinating insight into the life of the band and life of Ian, it was poignant and sad, but in a catharsis way. I had already read Deborah Curtis’s Touching From the Distance, but I feel that her vision was somewhat clouded by jealousies and bitterness, so Torn Apart seemed more sincere and more objective. Then I had to watch Control (2007) again and listen to Joy Division, hearing every lyric and sound in a fresh and exciting way. Also, it being the month of Reinaldo Arenas’s birthday, my thought drifted to him as well and here is something he said that I liked: “Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.”

“Edmund was your friend. I too am very sorry that he is dead. But I think you are grieving yourselves sick over this, and not only does that not help him, it hurts you. And besides, is death really so terrible a thing? It seems terrible to you, because you are young, but who is to say he is not better off now than you are? Or – if death is a journey to another place – that you will not see him again? …. It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing,’ he said. ‘You are like children. Afraid of the dark.” (The Secret History)

Picture found here.

Picture found here.butterfly by zaiko.monster on Flickr.

Pic found here.

Picture found here.

Tea & Cats Dress from annyamarttinen

Picture found here.

Picture by Laura Makabresku.

John Corbet, The Tower

Picture by Laura Makabresku

Drawing by Virginia Mori, found here.

Girl with a pink aureola, by John Corbet

By: Joe Pickard | josephowen

John Corbet – The Tower

“All was moorland loneliness and midnight hush.”

(Jane Eyre)

John Corbet, The Tower, 2020, watercolour

John Corbet is one of my favourite contemporary artists; I enjoyed seeing his style develop throughout the years and I am always curious to see what wonderful and dreamy watercolours and pastels his brush and his imagination will give birth to. I already wrote about his Renoir inspired watercolour here. One of his most recent works called “The Tower” was a love at first sight for me. It’s hard to explain what particular element of the watercolour appeals to me so much because I love all of it; first of all, it’s easy to seduce me with watercolours, then I just love the colours; hushed and melancholy shades of purple, greys and blues, like a cloudy sky just moments before a rainstorm. The scene excites my imagination and the mystery compels me to further gaze at the painting. A pale young girl is seen running over the moors, her purple dress, like a fragrant and large violet petal, swamps the lower part of the paper, flowing like a deep purple river, widening down from her slender waist.

One can just feel the Gothic mood of the watercolour, the mystery and suspense, shining through in dark colours and objects that seemed to serves as symbols open to interpretation, for example the looming yellowish tower on the hill; it can symbolise the captivity, a bird cage for the young maiden, or a protection from the harsh realities symbolised by the darkness and gloom of the strange moors and meadows she found herself in, it can be a prison and a safe haven, depends on what you wish you see. Its erect shape and unbreakable strength could also bring to mind other things, in a Freudian way. Also, the motif of a tower instantly brought to mind the painting “Vejez” by a female Spanish-Mexican Surreliast painter Remedios Varo. In the painting, a pink tower is shown to be full of cracks and starting to be overgrown by ivy, and it certainly has a lot of character despite being an object.

Without a doubt, there is a secret connection between the innocent Gothic maiden and the stern face vaguely yet convincingly appearing in the grey cloud. I will imagine it is her strict guardian watching over her, in spirit, even when he is not near her in flesh. “When I’m not there, in spirit I’ll be there”, to quote Depeche Mode’s song “Disease”. Her eyes are turned upwards; she can sense his gaze upon her and she knows there is no way to escape, no matter how fast or far she ran over the meadows and moors, she knows that her guardian transcends both time and space. The girl’s hair dancing in the melody of the wind and the raspberry pink ribbons on her sleeves form a repeating pattern and add to the scene’s drama and a whirlwind of intensity.

Remedios Varo, Vejez, 1948

The stern face in the cloud and the round rosy-cheeked face of the maiden in a violet-gown brought to mind the mystical connection between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester when they both, at the same moment, around midnight, heard each other’s voices and cries, coming from kilometers afar, more through the power of mind than physically through space:

“All the house was still; for I believe all, except St. John and myself, were now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out: the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick: I heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling: it acted on my senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned and forced to wake. They rose expectant: eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones.

“What have you heard? What do you see?” asked St. John. I saw nothing, but I heard a voice somewhere cry —

“Jane! Jane! Jane!” — nothing more.

“O God! what is it?” I gasped.

I might have said, “Where is it?” for it did not seem in the room — nor in the house — nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air — nor from under the earth — nor from overhead. I had heard it — where, or whence, for ever impossible to know! And it was the voice of a human being — a known, loved, well-remembered voice — that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently.

“I am coming!” I cried. “Wait for me! Oh, I will come!” I flew to the door and looked into the passage: it was dark. I ran out into the garden: it was void.

“Where are you?” I exclaimed.

The hills beyond Marsh Glen sent the answer faintly back — “Where are you?” I listened. The wind sighed low in the firs: all was moorland loneliness and midnight hush.”

Jane Eyre (2011): In spirit, I believe we must have met.

And here is what Mr Rochester tells Jane later on, when they meet again:

“As I exclaimed ‘Jane! Jane! Jane!’ a voice- I cannot tell whence the voice came, but I know whose voice it was- replied, ‘I am coming: wait for me;’ and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words- ‘Where are you?’ “I’ll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened to my mind: yet it is difficult to express what I want to express. Ferndean is buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls dull, and dies unreverberating. ‘Where are you?’ seemed spoken amongst mountains; for I heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words. Cooler and fresher at the moment the gale seemed to visit my brow: I could have deemed that in some wild, lone scene, I and Jane were meeting. In spirit, I believe we must have met. You no doubt were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane: perhaps your soul wandered from its cell to comfort mine; for those were your accents- as certain as I live- they were yours!” Reader, it was on Monday night- near midnight- that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to it.“

In the same way, we know the face in the cloud cannot be real but we can imagine what powerful bonds connects their spirits that the girl can feel his gaze upon her even when she is out on the meadow.

You can visit the artist’s page here.

John Fowles’s The Collector and The Smiths: What Difference Does It Make? It makes none

“Oh, the devil will find work for idle hands to do”

(The Smiths)

The original cover featuring Terence Stamp

This is my third and final post (well at least final for now) in relation to John Fowles’ novel “The Collector”; I already wrote a book review, a post about the theme of art in the novel because Miranda was an art student, and now this post which connects the film with the song by The Smiths. Allow me to first open the Bible of misery, melancholy and self-pity: Morrissey’s Autobiography that is, and let us go to the page one hundred and sixty three and see what is there to be said about the song What Difference Does it Make? and the Terence Stamp cover picture incident:

“I nominate Pretty girls make graves as the third single, but a bastion of bearded Rough Trade battleaxes drop on me like a ton of beansprouts and argue against a song with a title that would have made Mary Wollstonecraft throw in the tea-towel. Rough Trade wheel out “What Difference Does It Make?” as the next single. I had loved the song until its defilement on “The Smiths” album; the loose swain’s saunter now sounded stiff and inflexible, the drums sounding too frightened to move, the voice sounding like something gone to its reward – or, at least, resting in peace. I use a photograph of Terence Stamp as the sleeve image partly because I am assured that clearance can be gained from Stamp through Geoff’s mutual friendship with Sandie Shaw. Once the single is issued, Terence Stamp objects and will say (years later) that ‘Morrissey did not ask for approval.’ A new shot is panicked together, wherein I imitate the Stamp shot, although I choose to hold a glass of milk in place of Stamp’s strychnine-soaked muslin cloth. I am ugly against Stamp’s glamor-handsomeness, but it will have to do, since the single has already risen to number 12. Evidently Rough Trade are quite pleased about the sudden censoring of the original sleeve, because it might mean that collectors buy the single with the new sleeve also, thus bumping up sales.”

I really adore the song Pretty girls make graves, so I agree with Morrissey. In the novel, Frederick (played in the film by Terence Stamp) drugs the beautiful art student Miranda with chloroform not with strychnine, but oh well Morrissey, I forgive you a lousy little mistake. It seems that in both covers the devil did find work for idle hands to do because they are both holding something. Even though the song and the film have nothing in common really, the cover picture was Morrissey’s homage to the films and film stars of the 1950s and 1960s that he loved. The aesthetic of the kitchen sink dramas appealed to his grim view of the world around him.

The cover with Morrissey and a glass of milk

All men have secrets and here is mine
So let it be known
For we have been through hell and high tide
I think I can rely on you
And yet you start to recoil
Heavy words are so lightly thrown
But still I’d leap in front of a flying bullet for you

So, what difference does it make?
So, what difference does it make?
It makes none
But now you have gone
And you must be looking very old tonight

The devil will find work for idle hands to do
I stole and I lied, and why?
Because you asked me to!
But now you make me feel so ashamed
Because I’ve only got two hands
Well, I’m still fond of you, oh-ho-oh

So, what difference does it make?
Oh, what difference does it make?
Oh, it makes none
But now you have gone
And your prejudice won’t keep you warm tonight

Oh, the devil will find work for idle hands to do
I stole, and then I lied
Just because you asked me to
But now you know the truth about me
You won’t see me anymore
Well, I’m still fond of you, oh-ho-oh

But no more apologies
No more, no more apologies
Oh, I’m too tired
I’m so sick and tired
And I’m feeling very sick and ill today
But I’m still fond of you, oh-ho-oh

Oh, my sacred one
Oh

Art in John Fowles’s The Collector

“I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From what I want to be.”

(John Fowles, The Collector)

Berthe Morisot, Child With A Red Apron, 1886

John Fowles’ debut novel “The Collector” is one of the most fascinating novels I’ve read recently and it will probably become one of my all time favourites as well because the theme is so fascinating. It’s about a lonely, alienated individual called Frederick who collects butterflies and one day “collects” a girl called Miranda, a pretty twenty year old art student that he had spent weeks admiring from afar. I wrote a book review of it here, but today I would like to focus on the theme of art in the novel because it’s not so often that art gets mentioned in fiction. Art is bound to come up in the conversation with Frederick because Miranda is an art student in the dawn of the sixties so it’s specially interesting to hear her thoughts on the then contemporary art world. After Frederick kidnaps her, he keeps her in his basement and they spend time together and start to get to know each other. On one of such occasions, Miranda draws a portrait of him:

“One day about then she did a picture of me, like returned the compliment. I had to sit in a chair and look at the corner of the room. After half an hour she tore up the drawing before I could stop her. (She often tore up. Artistic temperament, I suppose.) I’d have liked it, I said. But she didn’t even reply to that, she just said, don’t move. From time to time she talked. Mostly personal remarks. “You’re very difficult to get. You’re so featureless. Everything’s nondescript. I’m thinking of you as an object, not as a person.” Later she said, “You’re not ugly, but your face has all sorts of ugly habits. Your underlip is worst. It betrays you.” I looked in the mirror upstairs, but I couldn’t see what she meant.”

Paul Cezanne, Four Apples, 1881

Another time, Miranda made still life studies of fruits in a bowl. I think this scene shows Miranda’s artistic temperament and how Frederick never has a clue about anything, he is so inferior to her in every sense that Miranda cannot help but laugh. For example, he thinks the best painting is the one that is most accurate, most realistic, he doesn’t understand why someone paints something in a free-spirited, colourful way:

“Another day she drew a bowl of fruit. She drew them about ten times, and then she pinned them all up on the screen and asked me to pick the best. I said they were all beautiful but she insisted so I plumped for one. “That’s the worst,” she said. “That’s a clever little art student’s picture.” She said, “One of them is good. I know it is good. It is worth all the rest a hundred times over. If you can pick it in three guesses you can have it for nothing when I go. If I go. If you don’t, you must give me ten guineas for it.” Well, ignoring her dig I had three guesses, they were all wrong. The one that was so good only looked half-finished to me, you could hardly tell what the fruit were and it was all lop-sided. “There I’m just on the threshold of saying something about the fruit. I don’t actually say it, but you get the idea that I might. Do you feel that?” I said I didn’t actually. She went and got a book of pictures by Cezanne. “There,” she said, pointing to a coloured one of a plate of apples. “He’s not only saying everything there is about the apples, but everything about all apples and all form and colour.” I take your word for it, I said. All your pictures are nice, I said. She just looked at me. “Ferdinand,” she said. “They should have called you Caliban.”

Syd Barrett with his painting, spring 1964

And I chose this last quote because it shows Miranda’s view on art at the time, her disdain for the avant-garde approach to art. This picture of Syd Barrett above may seem out of place because the post is not about him or the Pink Floyd, but the reason I decided to include it is because he was an art student in the early sixties. When I read The Collector and thought about Miranda, I also thought about the real people and the real art scene from that time. Miranda the book character was probably a few years older, but they could have crossed paths in London. Syd’s generation praise imagination and had a child-like vision of things and I love that approach to art; experimental and fun, not stuffy and rigid and full of rules. I also love how Miranda points out that the bottom line is that either you can paint or you can’t, and I agree:

“I felt our whole age was a hoax, a sham. The way people talk and talk about tachism and cubism and this ism and that ism and all the long words they use — great smeary clots of words and phrases. All to hide the fact that either you can paint or you can’t. I want to paint like Berthe Morisot, I don’t mean with her colours or forms or anything physical, but with her simplicity and light. I don’t want to be clever or great or “significant” or given all that clumsy masculine analysis. I want to paint sunlight on children’s faces, or flowers in a hedge or a street after April rain. The essences. Not the things themselves. Swimmings of light on the smallest things. Or am I being sentimental? Depressed. I’m so far from everything. From normality. From light. From what I want to be.“

Voyeurism in Edward Hopper’s Night Windows and Hitchcock’s Rear Window

American painter Edward Hopper was born on this day in 1882 in the Hudson river town of Nyack, New York, and what better opportunity to publish this post than on the man’s birthday!

Edward Hopper, Night Windows, 1928

Although Edward Hopper is mostly remembered as the painter who captured the alienating mood of the modern city in his scenes of solitary people, lonesome bars and empty streets, but it’s not the portrayal of the alienation in the city which fascinates me the most in his art but the voyeurism which shines through in his painting “Night Windows”. While we gaze at the painting, we too are the voyeurs of this quiet night scene tinged with eroticism and mystery. Three windows reveal to us a sight of an illuminated room where a figure of a woman dressed in a salmon toned slip is half-hidden from us, and yet the little glimpse of her that we do have makes us crave her presence. The figure of a woman in a slip is sensual yet subtle. The darkness on the outside of the murky old building is contrasted strongly with the interior full of lightness and intrigue. The woman is like an actress on an illuminated stage, aware that all eyes of the auditorium are on her, yet feigning ignorance of the fact. The painting looks like a still from the film, and indeed Hopper’s other passion, besides painting, was the cinema. Two windows are closed, but the third one is open and allowing the fresh night air into the room. A billowing white curtain is dancing in the midnight breeze.

Even though the painting seems like a film scene, the inspiration came from literature and not from cinema: “Night Windows recalls the experience of the voyeur pastor in “The Strength of God,” one of Sherwood Anderson’s short stories in Winesburg, Ohio. From the clergyman’s study in the church bell tower, he accidentally discovers that he can see into the bedroom of a young woman in the house next door. He becomes a virtual Peeping Tom, unable to resist being drawn to spy upon the woman in various states of undress. “When the shade of the window to Kate Swift’s room was raised he could see, through the hole, directly into her bed.” (…) Night Windows communicates a mood like that, too, of Anderson’s 1923 Many Marriages, which was the first of his novels to focus on modern sexual experience. (…) Anderson’s preoccupation in Many Marriages is with the symbolic value of nudity, sexual frankness, and the inner emotional life of its characters. In a number of his subsequent oil paintings. Hopper addressed similar issues of voyeurism, temptation, repression, and sexual ennui, continuing the imaginative exploration of the etchings.” (Gail Levin, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography, 1995)

The same voyeurism appears in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rear Window” (1954) where the broken-legged photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (played by James Stewart) spends the long, lazy and hot summer days resting and spying at his neighbours in his Chelsea apartment whose rear window is looking out into the courtyard. At first he is doing it to pass the time and then later their seemingly ordinary lives begin to intrigue him more and more. Each neighbour is like an animal in the zoos; not behind bars but behind their large windows and balconies, ordinary yet strange in their unique way. He observes a flamboyant dancer he nicknames “Miss Torso”; a single woman he calls “Miss Lonelyhearts”; a talented yet lonely pianist, a newlywed couple, and a middle-aged couple who sleep on their balcony in hot summer nights, a female amateur sculptor; and Lars Thorwald who is a traveling salesman with an ill wife. The beautiful and sophisticated Grace Kelly plays his girlfriend who joins him in his peeping Tom activities which ultimately lead them both to a discovery of a murder. I really liked something that Jeff’s friend Tom, who is a detective, said about spying on neighbours: “That’s a secret, private world you are looking into out there. People do a lot of things in private which they couldn’t possibly explain in public.” And Edward Hopper captured that world on his canvases.

Reinaldo Arenas – Viejo Niño

Wonderful Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas was born on 16th July 1943 and I celebrated his birthday by thinking about him and his amazing autobiography called “Before Night Falls” which has been my source of inspiration and strength ever since I read it three summers ago. His poem called “Viejo Niño” was written in 1989, just a year before Arenas died on 7th December 1990, and it portrays his childhood so well, in a direct, sincere and amusing way; a childhood of poverty and magic, spent in the Cuban countryside, with a single mother, her family and the all pervading awareness of the mother’s sadness and yearning for the man who had left her soon after they married and Reinaldo, a little boy sitting on her lap, was a reminder of that. A childhood of fascination with all things of nature, mud and rains, chasing roosters and playing with other children under the vast treetops, hiding from the burning sun of the Caribbean. Arenas was all too aware of how unlovable and unwanted he was, but it never stopped him from enjoying the little wonders his childish eyes saw around him.

Egon Schiele, Young Boy, 1918, 45.5×27 cm, gouache, pencil, watercolor on paper

Viejo Niño

I am that child with the round, dirty face

who on every corner bothers you with his

“Can you spare a quarter?”

 

I am that child with the dirty face

no doubt unwanted

that from far away contemplates coaches

where other children

emit laughter and jump up and down considerably

 

I am that unlikeable child

definitely unwanted

with the round dirty face

who before the giant street lights or

under the grandames also illuminated

or in front of the little girls that seem to levitate

projects the insult of his dirty face

 

I am that angry and lonely child of always,

that throws you the insult of that angry child of always

and warns you:

if hypocritically you pat me on the head

I would take that opportunity to steal your wallet.

 

I am that child of always

before the panorama of imminent terror,

imminent leprosy, imminent fleas,

of offenses and the imminent crime.

I am that repulsive child that improvises a bed

out of an old cardboard box and waits,

certain that you will accompany me.

Book Review: The Collector by John Fowles

I read quite a few interesting novels lately, but John Fowles’ debut novel “The Collector”, published in May 1963, is the most peculiar one; both the theme and the style in which it was written are fascinating. I discovered this novel by serendipity, completely randomly, but it turned out that this was exactly the kind of novel I craved. I was captivated from the very first page because from the very beginning Fowles places the reader into the mind of a seemingly ordinary, yet very unusual individual named Frederick Clegg. Frederick isn’t the Arnold Layne from Pink Floyd’s song, stealing and collecting girls knickers from the washing lines in suburban gardens of Cambridge, but he is a collector of other things; firstly the butterflies, and then one beautiful girl called Miranda he watches from afar and over time falls in love with, despite not knowing anything about her really, apart of the Art School she goes to and what she looks like. He is a socially awkward, strange individual and it’s hard to decide whether he is good or bad; the things he does are bad, but his intentions truly are not.

His early daydreams about her are very romantic and sweet, but concerning in their delusional nature: “I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later. She drew pictures and I looked after my collection (in my dreams). It was always she loving me and my collection, drawing and colouring them; working together in a beautiful modern house in a big room with one of those huge glass windows; meetings there of the Bug Section, where instead of saying almost nothing in case I made mistakes we were the popular host and hostess. She all pretty with her pale blonde hair and grey eyes and of course the other men all green round the gills.”

Other days the sweetness of these innocent daydreams takes a darker tone when he sees her spending time with other men, for he, naturally, wants her all for himself, even though Miranda doesn’t even know he exists: “The only times I didn’t have nice dreams about her being when I saw her with a certain young man, a loud noisy public-school type who had a sports car. Those were days I let myself have the bad dreams. She cried or usually knelt. Once I let myself dream I hit her across the face as I saw it done once by a chap in a telly play. Perhaps that was when it all started.”

Catherine Deneuve in UK filming 1965 British psychological horror Repulsion, London, Friday 2nd October 1964. Photo by Wilson

One day, Frederick wins a prize in the football pools and decides to buy a lonely and old countryside house. From that moment on, his daydreams and wild fantasies become serious plans; he decorates the cellar and is ready to catch his butterfly-victim Miranda. One evening he follows her after her classes: “It was all planned. And then she was near. She’d come up and round without me seeing, only twenty yards away, walking quickly. If it had been a clear night I don’t know what I’d have done. But there was this wind in the trees. Gusty. I could see there was no one behind her. Then she was right beside me, coming up the pavement. Funny, singing to herself.” After he kidnaps her, he drives her to his countryside house and locks her in the cellar. The novel is divided in three parts; the first part is seen from Frederick’s point of view, the second part is Miranda’s diary written in captivity, and a tiny bit at the end is again told from Frederick’s point of view.

Miranda’s emotions change greatly throughout the novel; at first she is frightened and thinks he must be interested only in sex, which isn’t true, but as she gets to know him, she realises just how pathetic, uneducated, uncultured and weak he truly is; a working class nobody, that is how she sees him, for she is a posh, middle-class art student. He doesn’t have a clue about art or Mozart; things that Miranda loves. Frederick also realises that Miranda is far from the girl of his dreams; she is insolent, she regularly mocks him for the way he walks and talks, decorates his house, nothing escapes her snobbish prejudice. And the most heartbreaking realisation comes in the end, when he realises that she never loved him. The realism gives this novel humanity; Frederick isn’t a cruel savage and a monster, but rather a lonely, confused, strange individual who simply wants to connect with another human being, and he tries doing that the only way he thinks it’s possible, as he says: “if she’s with me, she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand. There was always the idea she would understand.” Things aren’t always black and white and this novel shows the complexities of such a situation. Even though one would assume Miranda was a poor victim and Frederick the evil person, I grew fond of Frederick whilst reading the novel and I developed a sadness and understanding for him. I don’t think he has a cruel heart.

And now more quotes I enjoyed:

“That was the day I first gave myself the dream that came true. It began where she was being attacked by a man and I ran up and rescued her. Then somehow I was the man that attacked her, only I didn’t hurt her; I captured her and drove her off in the van to a remote house and there I kept her captive in a nice way. Gradually she came to know me and like me and the dream grew into the one about our living in a nice modern house, married, with kids and everything. It haunted me. It kept me awake at nights, it made me forget what I was doing during the day. I stayed on and on at the Cremorne. It stopped being a dream, it began to be what I pretended was really going to happen (of course, I thought it was only pretending) so I thought of ways and means — all the things I would have to arrange and think about and how I’d do it and all. I thought, I can’t ever get to know her in the ordinary way, but if she’s with me, she’ll see my good points, she’ll understand. There was always the idea she would understand.”

Apollo Butterfly, Illustrations taken from ‘The Natural History of British Butterflies’ by Edward Donovan, Printed for the author in 1792 and for F. and C. Rivington

“He’s so slow, so unimaginative, so lifeless. Like zinc white. I see it’s a sort of tyranny he has over me. He forces me to be changeable, to act. To show off. The hateful tyranny of weak people. The ordinary man is the curse of civilization. But he’s so ordinary that he’s extraordinary. He takes photographs. He wants to take a “portrait” of me. Then there were his butterflies, which I suppose were rather beautiful. Yes, rather beautifully arranged, with their poor little wings stretched out all at the same angle. And I felt for them, poor dead butterflies, my fellow-victims.”

“She’d taken her blue jumper off, she stood there in a dark green tartan dress, like a schoolgirl tunic, with a white blouse open at the throat. Her hair swept back into the pigtail. Her lovely face. She looked brave. I don’t know why, I thought of her sitting on my knees, very still, with me stroking her soft blonde hair, all out loose as I saw it after. Suddenly I said, I love you. It’s driven me mad. She said, “I see,” in a queer grave voice. She didn’t look at me any more then. I know it’s old-fashioned to say you love a woman, I never meant to do it then. In my dreams it was always we looked into each other’s eyes one day and then we kissed and nothing was said until after.”

“For some time she sat smoking, with her eyes shut, as if the sight of me tired her eyes.”

High Brown Fritillary, Illustrations taken from ‘The Natural History of British Butterflies’ by Edward Donovan, Printed for the author in 1792 and for F. and C. Rivington

The author explained the inspiration behind the novel in his journal entry for 3rd February 1963:

“The Collector. The three sources. One. My lifelong fantasy of imprisoning a girl underground. I think I must go back to early in my teens. I remember it used to be famous people Princess Margaret, various film stars. Of course, there was a sexual motive; the love-through-knowledge motive, or motif, has also been constant. The imprisoning in other words, has always been a forcing of my personality as well as my penis on the girl concerned. Variations I can recall: the harem (several girls in one room, or in a row of rooms); the threat (this involves sharing a whip, but usually not flagellation—the idea of exerted tyranny, entering as executioner); the fellow-prisoner (this by far the commonest variation: the girl is captured and put naked into the underground room; I then have myself put in it, as if I am a fellow-prisoner, and so avoid her hostility). Another common sexual fantasy is the selection board: I am given six hundred girls to choose fifty from and so on. These fantasies have long been exteriorized in my mind, of course; certainly I use the underground-room one far less since The Collector.

Two, the air-raid shelter incident.

Three, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle.“

Robert Henri: The Art Spirit and Painting a Portrait

“Work with great speed. Have your energies alert, up and active. Finish as quickly as you can. There is no virtue in de-laying.“

(Robert Henri)

Robert Henri, Mary of Connemara, 1913

Robert Henri, American artist connected with the Ashcan School, died on 12th July 1929 in New York. As I already mentioned in my previous post about Robert Henri’s “Irish Lass” painted in 1913, Henri was an amazing art teacher, along with being a brilliant and prolific artist, a rare combination, and his teachings were collected in 1923 (six years before he died in 1929) in a work called “The Art Spirit” by his students. Many of them were poor workers who would often work all day, then attend Henri’s painting classes in the evening and slept outdoors, on some bench in the park because they could not afford a room. This only shows how Henri aimed to awake the artist in all of his students and didn’t care about social class or what jobs they had during the day, for Henri the ability to be an artist was something everyone possessed and it needed to be awaken by a good teacher or something else. Here are some excerpts from “The Art Spirit” where Henri speaks of the way a portrait ought to be painted:

“When later you come to the painting of the features of the face, consider well the feature’s part in relation to the idea you have to express. It will not be so much a question of painting that nose as it will be painting the expression of that nose. All the features are concerned in one expression which manifests the state of mind or the condition of the sitter. No feature should be started until you have fully comprehended its character and have established in your mind the manner of its full accomplishment. To stop in the process of drawing the lines of a feature to inquire “what next” is surely to leave a record of disconnection. No feature should be drawn except in its relation to the others. There is a dominating movement through all the features. There is sequence in their relationship. There is sequence in the leading lines of the features with the movements of the body. This spirit of related movement is very important in the drawing or painting of hair.”

“Hair is beautiful in itself, this should not be forgotten, but it is the last position of importance it takes in the make-up of a portrait.The hair must draw the grace and dignity—perhaps the brains—of the head. The lights on the hair must be used to stress the construction, to vitalize, accentuate and continue movement. The outline of the hair over the face must be used as a principal agent for the drawing of the forms of the forehead and temples, and must at the same time partake of the general movement of the shoulders and of the whole body. The hair is to be used as a great drawing medium. It is to be rendered according to its nature, but it is not to be copied. Think well on this; it is very important.”

“The eyebrows are hair in the last instance. To a good draftsman they are primarily powerful evidences of the muscular actions of the forehead, which muscular actions are manifestations of the sitter’s state of being. The muscles respond instantly to such obvious sensations as surprise, horror, pain, mirth, inquiry, etc., and the actions of the muscles are most defined in their effect on that strongly marked line of hair, the eyebrow. However subtle the emotion, the eye-brow by its definiteness marks the response in the muscular movement.In certain heads, the eyebrow, while normal, still holds a very positive gesture. There are those, therefore, who carry in repose an expression of sadness, boredom, surprise, dignity, and some accentuate the force or direction in the action of looking. To a good draughtsman the eyebrow is a living thing. It develops a habit which it expresses in repose and it flashes intelligence of every changing emotion.”

Robert Henri, Irish Lass, 1913

“By the spring in the drawing of the eyelash the quick action of the eye may be suggested. The upper eyelid and lash generally cast a shadow scarcely observed yet very effective on the eyeball. The white of the eye is more often the same color as the flesh about it than the average painter is likely to think it to be. The pupil is larger in quiet light, becoming very small by contraction when looking into brilliant light.The highlight in the pupil is a matter of drawing although best done with one quick touch. Its direction, shape, edges,and its contrast in color and value to the pupil give shape,curve, brilliancy or mark the contrary.”

The lines and forms in the clothes should be used to draw the body in its sensitive relationship with the head.The wrinkles and forms of the clothes are building mate-rial not for tailoring in your hands but for established basic lines rising to the head. There is an orchestration through-out the whole canvas. Nothing is for itself, but each thing partaking of the other is living its greatest possibility, is surpassing itself with vitality and meaning and is part of the making of a great unity. (…)

Robert Henri, Little Irish Girl, 1913

“Do not tell me that you as students will first learn how to draw and then afterwards attend to all this. It is only through such motives that you can learn to draw. This kind of thought is drawing, the hand must obey the spirit. With motive you will become clairvoyant of means, will seize and command them. Without motive you will wabble about.

Realize that your sitter has a state of being, that this state of being manifests itself to you through form, color and gesture, that your appreciation of him has depended on your perception of these things in their significance, that they are there of your selection (others will see differently), that your work will be the statement of what have been your emotions, and you will use these specialized forms, colors and gestures to make your statement. Plainly you are to develop as a seer, as an appreciator as well as a craftsman. You are to give the craftsman in you a motive, else he cannot develop. All that I have said argues the predominant value of gesture. Gesture expresses through form and color the states of life.

Work with great speed. Have your energies alert, up and active. Finish as quickly as you can. There is no virtue in de-laying. Get the greatest possibility of expression in the larger masses first. Then the features in their greatest simplicity in concordance with and dependent on the mass. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can. There is no virtue in delaying.“

Robert Henri – Irish Lass

“My people may be old or young, rich or poor, I may speak their language or I may communicate with them only by gestures. But wherever I find them, the Indian at work in the white man’s way, the Spanish gypsy moving back to the freedom of the hills, the little boy, quiet and reticent before the stranger, my interest is awakened and my impulse immediately is to tell about them through my own language-drawing and painting in color.”

(Robert Henri)

Robert Henri, Irish Lass, 1913, oil on canvas 61 x 5.8 cm

Robert Henri, American artist, teacher and a guiding spirit of the Ashcan school, always spent his summers travelling either in Europe or in the States and he was always on the lookout for interesting and peculiar faces full of beauty and character to capture on his canvases. “Irish Lass” is one of such portraits of common people whose inner Beauty shines through colours and brushstrokes, the kind of Beauty seen only by those who seek to see Beauty at every step; the artists and the poets. This portrait of a young Irish girl is one of my favourites by Robert Henri, in general, and in particular these days. I find myself enjoying all the details; not what was painted, but how it was painted. Vigorous in his teachings, vigorous in his brushstrokes, Henri yearned to capture the rawness of the moment and that makes his paintings seem as if they aren’t bound to a specific time, the large blue eyes and rosy cheeks of the Irish Lass seem as fresh and alive as if they were painted yesterday. Vitality, freshness and vivacity permeate Henri’s portraits and other paintings.

Henri’s second wife, Marjorie Organ was Irish-born and the pair spent the summer of 1913 travelling through the emerald greenness of Ireland. I am sure Henri admired the beauty of the landscape, but what he captured on his canvases were not the verdant hills and old ruins, but rather the rosy cheeked fresh faces of both shy and wild Irish girls with auburn tresses. This Irish Lass, with the pink bows in her hair and that pretty white apron, looks like a wistful schoolgirl yearning for a life of adventure outside the bounds of her schoolbooks and her school yard, like a young Jane Eyre yearning to be a bird and transcend the barriers of her life. Her lips and cheeks are rosy, as if she had been running freely and exploring the wilderness. In his portraits, Henri always used colours to convey something; he used red and pink for the cheeks to signify vivacity and liveliness. Inner beauty radiates through the colours and shapes of this portrait, through her eyes as blue as the sea and flower forget me not and through the rest of her face and figure. I love how the volume is built through shades of colours.

Charles Burchfield: Catalogue of Tattered Dreams

“Burchfield’s paintings in the years between the wars are a catalogue of tattered dreams: abandoned towns with their false-fronted ramshackle facades, sitting on the edge of vast prairies, decrepit Victorian rowhouses, resembling tooth-less old women, the barren wastes left by industries once robust.”

(American Encounters: Art, History and Cultural Identity)

Charles Burchfield, Promenade, 1927-28, watercolour on paper, 31 5/8 x 42 1/2 inches (80.33 x 107.95 cm)

Charles Burchfield’s watercolours of streets, houses, lonely barns and fields all have a particularly haunting and captivating lyrical beauty, but his watercolour “Promenade” painted in 1927-28 seems to be my favourite because it is at once so whimsical and poetic and tinged with a certain melancholy of grey and brown shades. Abandonment and decay are motives which linger throughout Burchfield’s artworks. He gave a new life to motifs that Modernism had ignored; in times when other painters, such as Charles Sheeler, George Ault and Max Weber, glorified speed and modern architecture, Burchfield returned to the past, in a poetic and not sentimental way and portrayed all the lonely, forgotten corners of the town. This watercolour may not be the best example of Burchfield’s fascination with the motif of decay and abandonment that linger throughout his work, but it is incredibly poetic and shows how Burchfield gave personalities and unique quirks to buildings and places rather than people.

His watercolours such as “Promenade” look as if they arose from a puddle of rain; watery, grey and dipped in wistfulness and nostalgia. My eye wanders from one corner of the painting to the other and every bit of this artwork delights my eyes; the gloomy and mysterious houses have windows which resemble eye sockets, like something from Edgar Allan Poe, and so are the almost bare treetops with grey masses of leaves and long, dark and thin branches which stretch out like long shadowy arms ready to snatch you and take you down to the underworld. You can imagine the sad autumnal wind playing its mournful tunes and making the leaves dance between the street lanterns, wooden fences and trees. Once shining roofs and freshly painted facades now appear as if the whirlwind of change and decay had left its irreparable mark. The melancholy appeal of trees and houses is broken by the action in the street; cars are driving up and down the street, a plump old lady is walking her dog and three other dog are running after it, and this really adds a touch of liveliness to the mood. Still, the liveliness in the street doesn’t reflect itself on the old Victorian facades.

Watercolour “In a Deserted House” is a better example of Burchfield’s poetic enthusiasm for decaying places where spiders weave their webs in the corners of once dear and sunlight rooms, once cheerful wallpapers are now flaking, old fireplace is now cold, laughter is heard no more, and who lived there, no one knows any more. You can really feel that Burchfield felt the beauty and sadness of those places.

Charles Burchfield, In a Deserted House, ca. 1918-1939

Charles Burchfield, The Abandoned House, 1959